Facebook Ads For Filmmakers
Today, we wanted to share an experiment we tried using Facebook ads to help promote our Kickstarter campaign.
How’s it working? Will we use it again? Should you consider Facebook Ads?
Why Facebook Ads?
We decided to try Facebook Ads because it was so easy to reach out to our target audience.
Also, with Facebook Ads you can pay per click, not just per impression.
So we figured that even if many people never clicked on the ad, Steve’s face would be burning a hole somewhere in their subconscious.
Using this targeting criteria:
Facebook users who…
- live in the United States
- are age 25 and older
- like documentaries, documentary, independent films or indie films
This ad targets 196,900 potential Facebook users.
Bidding for Clicks
Facebook gives you a suggested amount you should bid for clicks (they also state that you’ll likely pay less than what you bid, which turned out to be true for us.)
We went with the lowest suggested bid, which we presume means that if we’re competing with someone for ad space in a similar category, they’ll get the space instead of us if they’ve bid more.
We ended up bidding $1.42 per click, but the average we’ve been charged per click is $1.27.
Daily Budget
You set a budget for how much you’d like to spend so you don’t suddenly owe Facebook thousands of dollars.
We chose $10 per day beginning the first week of our Kickstarter campaign.
Results?
Here’s where we’re at after 26 days of running the ad:
- Unique Individuals Reached: 32,835
- Number of impressions: 370,397
- Number of Clicks: 60
- Amount Spent: $76.05
We don’t have a way to know if those who’ve clicked have actually contributed to the campaign (if we were sending them to our website we could use Google analytics to figure out how many clicks turned into sales.)
That said, popping up Steve’s face over 370,000 times to over 30,000 people for around $75 seems pretty reasonable to us.
Granted, not everyone sees those ads (Joke keeps her browser small so she doesn’t have to look at Facebook ads, for instance.)
But as indie marketing goes, we’ve spent more on flyers that are hitting less targeted audiences than these Facebook ads.
Will We Use Facebook Ads Again?
Yes.
We’re looking at targeting specific cities and geographic locations through Facebook ads to sell tickets when we start touring Dying to do Letterman theatrically.
We’ll also try ads again when we start selling DVDs of the movie from our site, and can track how many clicks lead to actual sales.
(Shameless Plug: you can get your special collector’s edition of Dying to do Letterman with tons of extras when you pledge $50 or more to our Kickstarter Campaign.)
Should You Try Facebook Ads?
We’d recommend giving it a shot, especially if you have a very niche audience.
We could certainly target our ad to an even tighter group of people (say, folks who are fans of documentaries about comedy, or to people who like movies about inspirational cancer survivors) and will likely experiment with more targeted ads over time.
By now, you’ve all heard about our Kickstarter for an Oscar® campaign, and if you haven’t, you can learn more here.
Our Campaign to Give Back to You
Let’s face it…we all know that sometimes Kickstarter campaigns can tire everyone out.
Since we don’t believe in asking without giving, we’re working to provide something of real value every day we bug you to join our effort to fund our Academy Award® campaign.
So far we’ve given back some free motion graphics a tip on getting more FB likes for your own Kickstarter projects, and this post with the best blog posts we found, helping us earn $20,000 in just 48 hours, a benefit screening for Team Lucy, and some behind the scenes drama as we decided to change our Kickstarter video.
Best,
Joke and Biagio